la villa (w&d. robert guédiguian w. serge valletti)

Robert Guédiguian’s film is a chekhovian family drama. Three siblings come together when their elderly father is taken ill in his Corsican fishing village home. The siblings, all of them seemingly in their fifties, contemplate the life that has been and the life to come. One is an actress, another a writer and former political activist, who arrives with his younger girlfriend, and the third has run his father’s small restaurant, The Mange-Tout. Each will have their moment of epiphany as they come to terms with their father’s mortality. This is a solid, slightly theatrical drama, which moves at a stately pace, and is touched by occasional moments of serendipity which offset a slightly predictable narrative. It’s the kind of film the French, and only the French, seem to make a lot. There’s a subplot of some Moroccan children who have arrived as refugees and are being pursued by the police (a European trope now, as this notion has also featured in films by Kaurismäki, Guadagnino and even Haneke). The strand is touching but feels slightly contrived, and is a plot development which exists in order to reinforce the theme of French family dysfunction rather than reveal the suffering that might lead a family to take a boat from the coast of Africa across the Mediterranean. One wonders what Edward Said would make of this narrative twist. The most potent moment in the film, perhaps, is a sudden jagged sequence showing the characters arriving for the first time in the fishing village, thirty years previously, in a washed out Summer’s day, a sequence set to a rampaging Bob Dylan track. All of the sudden the film seems to transmogrify into something else, the bleak colours doused in Summer. 

(Checking imdb I discover: “Footage from the film Ki Lo Sa, by the same director, is used in a flashback sequence. The footage features the same actors of the main characters, but 31 years younger, which gives the flashback a realistic feel.” I also learn that Guédiguian works repeatedly with the same stable of actors, over the course of many years, which perhaps gives La Villa’s examination of the process of ageing an added resonance.)